The Man Without Qualities

by Robert Musil

  “Do you actually believe what you have just been saying?” he asked sternly, with no regard to considerations of civility. “Do you believe it can be done? Are you really of the opinion that it is possible to live in accordance with some analogy? If so, what would you do if His Grace were to give you a free hand? Do tell me, I beg you!”

  It was an awkward moment. Diotima was oddly enough reminded of a story she had read in the papers a few days before. A woman had received a merciless sentence for giving her lover an opportunity to murder her aged husband, who had not “exercised his marital rights” for years but would not agree to a separation. The case had caught Diotima’s attention by its quasi-medical physical detail, and held it by a certain perverse fascination; it was all so understandable that one was not inclined to blame any of the persons involved, limited as they were in their ability to help themselves; it was only some unnatural general state of affairs that gave rise to such situations. She had no idea what made her think of this case just at this moment. But she was also thinking that Ulrich had been talking to her lately about all sorts of things that were “up in the air,” and always ended up by annoying her with some outrageous suggestion of a personal kind. She had herself spoken of the soul emerging from its insubstantial state, in the case of a few privileged human beings. She decided that her cousin was just as unsure of himself as she was of herself, and perhaps just as passionate too. All of this was interwoven just now—in her head or in her heart, that abandoned seat of the noble Leinsdorfian amity—with the story of the condemned woman, in a way that caused her to sit there with parted lips, feeling that something terrible would happen if Arnheim and Ulrich were allowed to go on like this, but that it might be even worse if anyone interfered and tried to stop them.

  During Arnheim’s attack on him, Ulrich had been looking at Tuzzi. It cost Tuzzi an effort to hide his eager curiosity in the brown furrows of his face. He was thinking that all these goings-on in his house were now coming to a head, propelled by their inherent contradictions. Nor had he any sympathy for Ulrich, whose line of talk went quite against Tuzzi’s grain, convinced as he was that a man’s worth lay in his will or in his work, and certainly not in his feelings or ideas; to talk such nonsense about mere figures of speech, he felt, was positively indecent.

  Ulrich might have been sensing some of this, because he remembered telling Tuzzi that he would kill himself if the year he was “taking off” from his life were to pass without results. He had not said it in so many words but had made his meaning painfully clear, and he now felt ashamed of himself. Again he had the impression, without being able to account for it, that his moment of truth was at hand. Suddenly Gerda Fischel came to mind; there was a dangerous possibility of her coming to see him, to continue their last conversation. He realized that even as he had only been toying with her, they had already reached the limit of what words could do, and there was only one last step: he would have to fall in with the girl’s unexpressed longings, ungird his intellectual loins, and breach her “inner ramparts.” This was crazy; he would never have gone this far with Gerda had he not felt safe with her on this point. He was feeling a strangely sober, irritated exaltation, when he caught sight of Arnheim’s angry face and heard himself accused of having no respect for reality, followed by the words “Forgive my saying so, but such a crass Either/Or as yours is really too juvenile,” but he had lost the slightest inclination to answer any of it. He glanced at his watch and, with a smile of appeasement, said it had grown much too late for going on with the subject.

  In so saying he had regained his contact with the others. Section Chief Tuzzi even stood up, and barely masked this discourtesy by pretending to do something or other. Count Leinsdorf, too, had meanwhile calmed down; he would have been pleased to hear Ulrich put the Prussian in his place but did not mind his doing nothing about it. “When you like a man, you like him, that’s that,” he thought, “no matter how clever the other fellow’s talk may be.” And with a daring, though quite unconscious approach to Arnheim’s idea of the Mystery of the Whole, he continued cheerfully, as he looked at Ulrich’s expression (which was, at the moment, anything but intelligent): “One might even say that a nice, likable person simply can’t say or do anything really stupid.”

  The party quickly broke up. The General slipped his horn-rims into his pistol pocket, after having tried in vain to stick them into the bottom of his tunic; he had not yet found a proper place for this civilian instrument of wisdom. “Here we have an armed truce of the intellect,” he said to Tuzzi, like a pleased accomplice, alluding to the speedy dispersal of the last guests.

  Only Count Leinsdorf conscientiously held them all back for another moment: “What is the consensus, then?” And when no one found anything to say, he added peaceably: “Oh well, we shall see, we shall see.”

  117

  A DARK DAY FOR RACHEL

  Soliman’s sexual awakening and his decision to seduce Rachel made him feel as cold-blooded as a hunter sighting game, or a butcher sharpening his knives for the slaughter, but he had no idea how to go about it and what, exactly, a successful seduction was; in short, the more he had a man’s will, the more it made him feel the weakness of a boy. Rachel also had her sense of the inevitable next step, and ever since she had so self-forgetfully clung to Ulrich’s hand, that evening of the incident with Bonadea, she was quite beside herself, afloat in a state of acute erotic distraction that was also raining flowers on Soliman, as it were. But conditions just then were not favorable and made for delays. The cook had taken sick, Rachel’s time off had to be sacrificed, the heavy social schedule in the house was keeping her busy, and although Arnheim continued to visit Diotima often enough, it was as though they had decided that the two youngsters needed watching, for he seldom brought Soliman, and when he did, they saw each other only briefly, in the presence of their employers, with the proper blank and sullen looks on their faces.

  At this time they almost learned to hate each other, because they made one another feel the misery of being kept on too short a leash. Soliman was also driven by his mounting ardor to violent escapades; he planned to slip away from the hotel at night unbeknownst to his master, so he stole a bedsheet, which he tried to cut up and twist into a rope ladder; when he made a mess of it, he threw the tortured bed-sheet down a light shaft. Then for a long time he vainly studied ways and means to clamber up and down a housefront, using windowsills and the carved figures on the façade, and on his daytime errands examined the city’s fabled architecture solely for the hand- and footholds it might offer a cat burglar. Meanwhile Rachel, who had been told of all these plans and setbacks in hasty whispers, would think that she saw the black full moon of his face on the pavement below, looking up at her, or that she heard his chirping call, to which she attempted a shy response, leaning far out her window into the empty night, until she had to admit that the night was indeed empty. She no longer regarded this romantic muddle as a nuisance but surrendered herself to it with a yearning wistfulness. The yearning was actually for Ulrich; Soliman was the man one didn’t love but to whom one would give oneself nonetheless, as she never doubted; the fact that they had been kept apart lately, that they had hardly spoken to each other except in stolen whispers and were both in disfavor with their employers, had much the same effect on her as a night full of uncertainty, mystery, and sighs has on all lovers: it concentrated her fantasies like a burning glass, whose intense ray is felt less as a pleasant warmth than as a heat one cannot stand much longer.

  In this regard, Rachel, who did not waste any time fantasizing about rope ladders and climbing walls, was the more practical-minded. The nebulous dream of an elopement soon dwindled to a plan for a single night together, and when this could not be arranged, a stolen quarter of an hour would have to do. After all, neither Diotima nor Count Leinsdorf nor Arnheim—staying on together for another hour or two after some crowded and unproductive meeting with the best minds in town, while they all worried about the progress of their “business,” w
ithout need of further attentions from their staff—ever considered that such an hour “at liberty” consists of four quarter hours. But Rachel had thought about it, and since the cook was still not quite recovered and had permission to retire early, the young maid was so overburdened that there was no telling where she might be at any given time, even as she was spared much of her regular duty as a parlor maid. Experimentally—more or less as a person afraid of committing suicide outright will go on making halfhearted attempts until one of them succeeds by mistake—she had smuggled Soliman into her room several times already, always prepared with some story of having been on duty if he was caught, while hinting to him that there were other ways to her bedroom than climbing the walls. So far, however, the young lovers had not gone beyond yawning together in the front hall while spying out the situation, until one evening, when the voices inside the meeting room had been heard endlessly responding to each other, monotonous as the sounds of threshing, Soliman used a lovely expression he had read in a novel and said that he could stand it no longer.

  Even inside her little room it was he who bolted the door, but then they did not dare turn on the light but stood there blindly facing each other as though the loss of sight had deprived them of all their other senses as well, like two statues in the park at night. Soliman naturally thought of pressing Rachel’s hand or pinching her leg to make her shriek, his way of conducting his male conquest of her thus far, but he had to refrain from causing any noise, and when at last he made some clumsy pass at her, there was only Rachel’s impatient indifference in response. For Rachel felt the hand of fate on her spine, pushing her ahead, and her nose and forehead were ice cold, as though she had already been drained of all her illusions. It made Soliman feel quite at a loss too; he was all thumbs, and there was no telling how long it would take them to break the deadlock of their rigid posture face-to-face in the dark. In the end, it had to be the civilized and more experienced Rachel who took the part of the seducer. What helped her was the resentment she now felt in place of her former love for Diotima; ever since she had ceased to be content to enjoy vicariously her mistress’s exaltations and was involved in her own love affair, she had greatly changed. She not only told lies to cover up her encounters with Soliman, she even pulled Diotima’s hair when she combed it, to revenge herself for the vigilance with which her innocence was being guarded. But what enraged her most was something in which she had formerly delighted: having to wear Diotima’s cast-off chemises, panties, and stockings, for even though she cut these things down to a third of their former size and remodeled them, she felt imprisoned in them, as though wearing the yoke of propriety on her bare body. But this lingerie now gave her the inspiration she needed in this situation. For she had told Soliman earlier about the changes she had been noticing for some time in her mistress’s underthings, and now she could break their deadlock by simply showing him.

  “Here, you can see for yourself what they’re really up to,” she said in the darkness, showing Soliman the moonbeam frill of her little panties. “And if they’re carrying on together like this, then they’re certainly also making a fool of the master about that war they’re cooking up in our house.” And as the boy gingerly fingered the fine-textured and dangerous panties, she added somewhat breathlessly, “I bet that your pants are as black as you are, Soliman; that’s what they’re all saying.” Now Soliman vengefully but gently dug his nails into her thigh, and Rachel had to move closer to free herself, and had to do and say one thing and another, all of which produced no real result, until she finally used her sharp little teeth on Soliman’s face (which was pressed childishly against her own and at every movement she made kept on clumsily getting itself in the way), as if it were a large apple. At which point she forgot to feel embarrassed at what she was doing, and Soliman forgot to feel self-conscious, and love raged like a storm through the darkness.

  When it was over, it dropped the lovers with a thud, vanished through the walls, and the darkness between them was like a lump of coal with which the sinners had blackened themselves. They had lost track of time, overestimated the time they had taken, and were afraid. Rachel’s halfhearted final kiss was a mere annoyance to Soliman; he wanted the light switched on, and behaved like a burglar who has his loot and is now wholly intent upon making his getaway. Rachel, who had quickly and shamefacedly straightened her clothes, gave him a look that was fathomless and aimless at once. Her tousled hair hung down over her eyes, and behind them she saw again all the great images of her ideal self, forgotten until this moment. Her fantasies had been filled with her wish not only for every possible desirable trait in herself but also for a handsome, rich, and exciting lover—and now here in front of her stood Soliman, still half undressed, looking hopelessly ugly, and she didn’t believe a single word of all the stories he had told her. She might have liked to take advantage of the dark to cradle his tense, plump face in her arms a little while longer before they let go of each other. But now that the light was on, he was only her new lover, a thousand possibilities shrunken into one somewhat ludicrous little wretch, whose existence excluded all others. And Rachel herself was back to being a servant girl who had let herself be seduced and was now beginning to be terrified of having a baby, which would bring it all to light. She was simply too crushed by this transformation even to give a sigh. She helped Soliman to finish dressing, for in his confusion the boy had flung off his tight little jacket with all those buttons, but she was helping him not out of tenderness but only so that they could hurry downstairs. She had paid far more than it was worth, and to be caught out now would be the last straw. All the same, when they had finished, Soliman turned round and flashed her a dazzling smile that turned into a whinny of self-satisfaction. Rachel quickly picked up a box of matches, turned out the light, softly drew the bolt, and whispered, before opening the door: “You must give me one more kiss.” For that was the right way to do things, but it tasted to both of them like toothpowder on their lips.

  Back down in the front hall, they were amazed to find they still had time. The voices on the other side of the door were running on as before. By the time the guests were dispersing, Soliman had disappeared, and half an hour later Rachel was combing her mistress’s hair with great attentiveness and almost with her former humble devotion.

  “I am glad that my little lecture seems to have done you some good,” Diotima said with approval, and this woman who in so many ways never quite achieved any real satisfaction kindly patted her little maid’s hand.

  118

  SO KILL HIM!

  Walter had changed out of his office suit into a better one and was knotting his tie at Clarisse’s dresser mirror, which despite its irregularly curving art nouveau frame showed a shallow, distorted image in its cheap glass.

  “They’re absolutely right,” he said gruffly. “The famous campaign is nothing but a fake.”

  “But what’s the point of marching and screaming?” Clarisse said.

  “What’s the point of anything these days? Marching together, at least they’re forming a procession, feeling each other’s physical presence. And at least they’re not thinking, and at least they’re not writing; something may come of it.”

  “Do you really think the campaign is worth all that indignation?”

  Walter shrugged his shoulders. “Haven’t you read that resolution by the German faction in the paper? Haranguing the Prime Minister about defamation and unfairness to the German population and so on? And the sneering proclamation of the Czech League? Or the little item about the Polish delegates returning to their voting districts? For anyone who can read between the lines, that one’s the most revealing story, because so much depends on the Poles, and now they’ve left the government in the lurch! This was no time to provoke everyone by coming out with this patriotic campaign.”

  “This morning in town,” Clarisse said, “I saw mounted police go by, a whole regiment of them. A woman said they’re being kept in reserve somewhere.”

  “Of course.
There are troops standing by in the barracks too.”

  “Do you suppose there’ll be trouble?”

  “Who can tell?”

  “Will they run the people down? How awful, all those horses’ bodies jammed in among the people . . .”

  Walter had undone his tie and was reknotting it all over again.

  “Have you ever been mixed up in anything of this kind?” Clarisse asked.

  “As a student.”

  “Never since then?”

  Walter shook his head.

  “Didn’t you say just now that if there’s trouble, it will all be Ulrich’s fault?”

  “I said nothing of the kind,” Walter protested. “He takes no interest at all in politics, unfortunately. All I said was that it’s just like him to start up something of this sort; he’s involved with the people who are responsible for all this.”

  “I’d like to come into town with you,” Clarisse announced.

  “That’s out of the question. It would upset you too much.” Walter spoke with great firmness. He had heard all sorts of things in the office about what might happen at the demonstration, and he wanted to keep Clarisse away from it. It wouldn’t do at all to expose her to the hysteria of a large crowd; Clarisse had to be treated with care, like a pregnant woman. He almost got a lump in his throat at the word “pregnant,” even though he did not actually pronounce it, so unexpectedly had it come to mind, warming him with the thought of motherhood, however foolishly, considering his wife’s ill-tempered refusal of herself. Well, life is full of such contradictions, he told himself, not without some pride, and offered: “I’ll stay home, if you’d rather.”